If We Found Life on Mars, How Would We Know?

Finding evidence for life on Mars has been a many years-lengthy ambitions for NASA, which has spent billions of bucks to ship machines wheeling over, poking and probing the Red Planet. But as soon as the signs of life are located, how are the one’s findings verified?

In early January, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover got here across what some researchers notion might be hint fossils on Mars. Researchers first noticed the attention-catching, tiny, stick-like features in black-and-white imagery, however, they were compelling and uncommon enough for the rover technology group to roll the robotic returned to in addition interrogate them.

A strictly mineral foundation changed into deemed to be the most workable. Still, for some, the capabilities recommended bioturbation—a procedure through which organisms living in sediments can disturb the very structure of those sediments. The oddities appeared similar to Ordovician hint fossils here on Earth, which stem from a technology extra than 440 million years in the past. Regarding trace fossils on Mars, “We don’t rule it out,” Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and mission scientist for the Curiosity Mars rover informed Space.Com. “But we truly won’t leap to that as our first interpretation.”

The occasion underscored the diploma of difficulty in analyzing and analyzing such bizarre capabilities, in addition to the limits of routinely carried out “Curiosity technological know-how investigations” (CSI). But it additionally begs a fundamental question.

No doubt, Mars is conserving its secrets tight—but if the ongoing paintings of detecting life prove tremendous, what protocols are in place to confirm one of this verdict?

LADDER OF LIFE
“It has been a long-term since we’ve got visited the system for extraterrestrial life announcements,” stated NASA’s Michael Meyer, program scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory and lead scientist for the space organization’s Mars Exploration Program in Washington, D.C.

“My presumption is that the locating and statement could go up to our chain-of-command, extra than possibly going all of the ways to the President,” Meyer instructed Space.Com in an e-mail. “The perceived rapidity with which the locating would cross viral just adjustments the immediacy of the response. In a few approaches … not too exceptional from a spacecraft failure.”

Jim Green, NASA Planetary Science Division director, said to prepare to question and address the topic of direct detection of life some other place, NASA and the astrobiology community have crafted what’s tagged because of the “Ladder of Life Detection.” The ladder categorizes features that imply lifestyles, ordered from most to least indicative of lifestyles, and how they might be determined.

Green informed Space.Com that while life-detection tools have limitations, devices these days are at numerous rungs on that ladder. “Current structures deliver us symptoms that tell us what to do subsequent as we climb up that Ladder of Life,” he said.

The capacity to make a comprehensive set of measurements to hit upon the existence or past lifestyles on Mars is a complicated, evolving process, Green said, requiring a systematic approach. “So it really is wherein we’re. We’ve got the method, I suppose, to maintain transferring in that direction.” [Missions to Mars: A Robot Red Planet Invasion History (Infographic)]

MARTIAN METEORITES
Everett Gibson, the emeritus scientist at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, became co-leader of the crew that introduced in 1996 that it had found viable signatures of past lifestyles in ALH84001, a Martian meteorite that fell to Earth. Several years later, the group said that additional evidence in three more Martian samples bolstered its case.

The claims concerning ALH84001 had been hotly debated, with the wider medical community pointing to non-organic causes of the uncommon capabilities detected inside the meteorite. The debate over the feasible proof of lifestyles inside the Mars rock, however, is considered via many as a key occasion that helped shape the sphere of astrobiology. Gibson also determined the latest Curiosity images thrilling and is eager to learn the composition of the features imaged. “They strike a chord with me of things we have discovered all through the terrestrial geologic report of the Earth … however those capabilities are on Mars,” he instructed Space.Com.

“At least the JPL Curiosity group had sufficient interest to go returned and attain additional records on those features,” Gibson stated. “Now, if [only] they might do compositional measurements at the capabilities and the matrix from which they reside,” he said.

An evaluation by means of Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) device “might additionally be exceptional to are seeking for residual biochemical-associated compounds which may live with the capabilities,” Gibson stated.

While facts from SAM would have been great to have, it becomes now not used to have a look at the curious functions on Mars. (SAM is capable of taking a look at powdered rock and regolith drilling samples.)

“We did not get a risk to pattern those exciting features with SAM,” said Paul Mahaffy, primary investigator for SAM at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The Curiosity Mars crew has been doing troubleshooting work on the rover’s drill lately, he advised Space.Com, which precluded drilling for several months.

INTERPRETATIONS OF DATA
Regarding the search for life on Mars, Gibson stays confident about his crew’s ALH84001 meteorite analysis and claims, which might be now extra than 20 years vintage.

“We still stand with the aid of our 1996 record in Science mag, and none of our facts has been disproven … only interpretations of the records,” Gibson stated.

“Clearly early on Mars—in its first billion years—conditions were suitable for biogeochemical methods associated with living systems to have operated. Now we wait for similar information from Curiosity and the crew,” Gibson said.

Even if slam-dunk proof of lifestyles were to be found on Mars, how would it be introduced? And is there any method for double-checking the claims earlier than that momentous declaration? “None that I understand of,” astrobiologist John Rummel, a senior scientist with the SETI Institute and previous head of NASA’s Planetary Protection Office, advised Space.Com.

“I might anticipate that the clever factor to do would be to check the proof, in non-public, with a panel of experts who have a knowledge of the proof being tested, and then pass to an appropriate region from there,” Rummel said.

That professional organization, Rummel stated, might have to wrestle with some key questions, including What other evidence could be used to corroborate this sort of finding? What are the viable false-advantageous indicators that might be leading us to misidentify the evidence we are seeing? [How NASA Could Look for Ancient Life on Mars (Infographic)]

Rummel recollects that with ALH84001, multiple investigators had been able to take a look at the meteorite itself, as well as offer understanding related to the evidence gathered by way of the NASA Johnson Space Center group.

“I would say if one is confronted with tantalizing evidence of a probable ‘find’ of historic life on Mars,” Rummel said, “one’s first attention could be to reaffirm the interpretation of the proof already won, and to behavior different tests that might help or refute that interpretation.”

If one sees morphological proof—evidence primarily based on systems located on Mars—Rummel stated that chemical analyses must then be executed to look if the results are constant with the translation of the morphology. “Verification of the information in as many exclusive ways as viable is ideal,” he said.

That concept is shared with the aid of Bruce Jakosky, professor of geological sciences and associate director for technology at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. He is likewise important investigator for the MAVEN undertaking now orbiting Mars.

Jakosky said that Curiosity’s latest locate is very distinctive from the ALH84001 scenario.

“In the case of ALH84001, the unique researchers did a notable quantity of evaluation before going public, to outline the characteristics of what they have been seeing and to examine them against more than one extraordinary hypotheses of the way they might shape,” Jakosky advised Space.Com. “They put forward their fine hypothesis, discussed why both biological and nonbiological mechanisms for formation is probably viable and reached their best conclusion. They identified the uncertainties of their end as well,” he stated.

HORRIBLY PREMATURE
In the case of Curiosity finding bizarre functions, “all we’ve got thus far is a single set of pictures, with no additional in-situ evaluation of what’s gift and no thorough assessment towards competing hypotheses,” Jakosky said.

Speculation as to whether these functions may be organic “is horribly untimely,” Jakosky said. “While it can be that a biological starting place is feasible, technology is ready figuring out what is maximum possibly and now not just what’s feasible.”

If something is eventually determined that turns out to be organic, Jakosky suspects that such a conclusion might now not be presented in a grand press convention where the discoverers announce that lifestyles have been determined.

“The more likely state of affairs is that it’ll take more than one analyses via exclusive investigators and that a consensus could be built up over the years as non-biological eventualities are either dominated out or deemed to be much less likely,” Jakosky concluded.